The Woodworkhttp://terrychay.com
You tell that other boy, not to touch the woodworkMon, 23 Mar 2015 06:05:37 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Ulysseshttp://terrychay.com/article/ulysses.shtml
http://terrychay.com/article/ulysses.shtml#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 23:27:55 +0000http://terrychay.com/?p=6141The new version of Ulysses is out for Mac and iPad. (The Mac version is a free upgrade from Ulysses III; the iPad app is new).

It’s really hard to explain what this app is. In fact, I’ve been purchasing (and not using) this application for years before I realized that it strikes the right balance for a certain set of work.

…

The first time I experienced the love of typing letters into print was on the IBM Selectric II with a Prestige Elite 72typeball. This joy was magnified by the fact that I couldn’t read or write so the twin nightmares of Snopake paper and LiquidPaper fluid had yet to gobble me up. It was only last year and with much sadness when I finally Goodwill’d that big old blue behemoth.

…

If you like to write. Really. Like. To. Write. You inevitably develop a need-hate relationship with your word processor (usually Microsoft Word). Most people will stay in this relationship indefinitely because they don’t know any better.

I believe the problem started when the Macintosh introduced us to WYSIWYG. Editors became word processors that mix the look with the content. In programming, we call it mixing the view with the model. No matter how beautiful, this is not good. I can’t think of how many times in high school, when stuck with a writing assignment I hated, I procrastinated by tweaking my Word stylesheets or header/footer. This is especially pathetic because I am old enough to have recopied my essays by hand so the English teacher wouldn’t know I used a computer to edit them.

Very few will discover the solution is a throwback to the “text editor.” Back then it was BBEdit, today it is SublimeText. My first introduction to one was Bank Street Writer soon graduating to the wonderfully idiosyncratic vi, which I still use today as Vim.

The problem with these is that they were written for a specific non-applicable use case — most often by programmers for programming. When working with text, how do you do even simple things like emphasizestuff?

That’s when you discover Markdown and its endless variety of extensions and applications. Markdown is basically text-formatted in text (“markup”) done in a manner that’s designed to look the way you’d type it if you didn’t have access to such formatting (hence “markdown”). For instance typing “simple things like _emphasize_ **stuff**” will output to “simple things like emphasizestuff.” Besides the deft quickness of typing text even for formatting, you find its portability means you can be truly untethered from the editor you’re using — as Henry Ford once said, “Choose any [editor] you want, so long as it [understands Markdown].

Which editor then?

The path from and back to Ulysses

You want one that understand the purpose of writing is to write.

This is something that multi-use editors don’t get. Yes, I’m starting to appreciate Sublime, and you’ll pry vim from my cold-dead fingers when it comes to editing a config file, but for long-form writing and note-taking what I really want is just the editor, please, and enough to understand what I’m typing. I want that mythical ideal of “distraction-free” writing.

Ironically, the first to offer distraction-free writing as a fullscreen experience was actually Ulysses.

Full screen mode for Ulysses on my iMac is just a Cmd-Ctrl-F away. The theme here is “Simple” and the font is Courier Prime Sans.

The first distraction-free typing application or app you may have heard of was probably something along the lines of WriteRoom, Ommwriter, or iAWriter. They’re all great and do the trick, but if you work with anything longer than a couple pages you end up with a ton of flat files and no purpose to them. You gave up too much.

Maybe that’s when you start looking for software like Scrivener which allows you to organize multiple markdown pages into a hierarchical succession of files and so much more: organize your research, tagging, synopsis, cork board and outline views, and, if you’re feeling quite masochistic, you can integrate it with nearly any tool for export into nearly any format.

It’s that “so much more” that ends up being a problem. By the time you’re done setting up Scrivener, the full-screen distraction-free writing piece seems like an afterthought. You wake up and realize you’ve traded one set of “formatting” bells and whistles for a different set of “organizing and export” ones.

That’s when you come back to Ulysses. Write text files distraction-free with auto-save and auto-history and store it in iCloud where it is auto-synced and handoff-able to the iPad. Organize and export said text (or texts) how you want it (or them).

This blog post partially edited on the new Ulysses for iPad. The theme is “Tomorrow” and the font is Anonymous Pro.

Sure if you’re programming use Xcode or Sublime. If you have a quick letter maybe Pages or even TextEdit is better. A long collaborative document is still best in Google Docs. You still need something that opens Word documents when you get some business correspondence. DayOne still makes a better journal. And I can still even see the benefit of keeping iAWriter installed for one-off documents.

I’ll concede some points too: I find their icon selection a little lacking in expressivity. I miss the ability to simultaneously edit multiple scrivenings. Its synchronization with Marked is still a bit cumbersome. I’ll never quite be a fan of “Markdown XL” — the lack of being able to export annotations means I have to invent my own syntax when writing to my quirky blog which I still can’t directly post to in-app as I can in MarsEdit or MacJournal. Let’s not discuss the now-outdated and useless waste-of-money that was/is the experimental sister-app, Daedelus. And yes, as you can see, when I get stuck, I’ll still mess around on their style exchange—old habits die hard. Nothing is perfect.

But if you, like me, found all that other software getting in your way because you Just. Want. To. Write. Read more about Ulysses and if it interests you consider giving it a whirl. It took me many years and three false starts with the program, but I’m glad I did.

And now with this version on Mac and iPad, there are moments when it’s just me and the words I type. A small part of me remembers what it was like to feel at home with an editor again — even if the hum and clacking of ballhead impacting black ribbon on paper has been replaced by the silent digital rendering of pixels on a retina display.

It’s those moments and that feeling, Ulysses or no, I hope the writer in you experiences every time you decide to put words down.

This was the day of the 2nd Annual Worldwide Photowalk. On the way back to the car, I noticed these yellowjackets congregating around something. This became an excuse to pull out a closeup adapter and attempt some macro photography. I had to get pretty close though which caused my girlfriend some consternation.

The photo and processing was done a long time ago so I can’t comment on it very much. It looks like I had a predilection for overly saturated colors back then.

I just was feeling the giant row of carts receding all the way into their garden center.

When Marie was shopping, another shopper was indignant, “I can’t get at [a free sample] because your cart is in the way.” I think if you can’t deal with giant-assed shopping carts, you might want to shop somewhere else.

Shopping at Costco in the ‘burbs is always a study in small contrasts:

There they are using new shopping carts that are cut lower in the front and are much quieter than the old metal ones in the City.

I also noticed that a shopper had left a half-eaten resealed bag of beef jerky in the book and DVD aisle. You’d think with all the free samples, they could have not been so cheap. Especially since I noticed that there are far more free samples here than in the city.

I found a term used by the Costco employees who gather the carts: “leave behind.” As in, “Dude, there’s a whole pizza leave behind back there.”

Without photos, all I’d remember about this day was that I lost my Fitbit because the leash finally broke off. With them, I see I took this because I thought the rowboat would be ideally positioned in the frame despite the overcast day.

I made my first digitally produced panorama in 1995. It was painstaking to try to get Photoshop to align images that were improperly taken. Ever since Sony introduced panning scan in-camera panoramas (now standard in the iPhone), people stopped being awed by them. Still the quiet beauty of an old school dSLR stitch can be appreciated when small details are examined.

In panoramas, it is still important to compose with the principles of all landscape outdoor photography: foreground interest and anchoring. Foreground interest provides depth and is provided by the rowboat and vegetation kept in-frame for the entire scan. Anchor the edges with something (in this case the tree on the left and the couple walking along sidewalk on the right) because there must be a reason for being.

Beyond that cropping was limited by what I shot and to reduce the busyness of the fence in the foreground and some of the people walking on the sidewalk. The weather is nothing that a little black and white photography and the proper filter can’t fix. I also did my usual film curves adjustment and chose a slightly cooler tone.

A weekend away from it all was also an opportunity to try to shoot again with my Leica. I haven’t been doing any photography for a long time, especially with this camera — just having it with me was a minor success, even if I left it in the bag almost the entire time.

Finally, while we were eating a quiet lunch in St. Helena, I got the courage to take the M8 out and to start shooting. It’s frustrating to realize that you have to relearn how to focus and expose manually — even more embarrassing is forgetting to take off the lens cap before pressing the shutter button! But then you remember that photography is about learning how to see, and there is a small joy in experiencing that again as a beginner.

Marie said she liked this photo of her, but all I can think about is how I focused on the wrong eye and the tight cropping is just a function of the close-focusing limits of the camera rather than any artistic skills on my part.

There is something about shooting with this camera that compels me to prefer black-and-white processing/ I long ago set the Leica’s JPEGs to monochrome so I have an inkling of what it might look like post-processing.

Food photography

A camera when dining is always an opportunity for some guilt-free foodspotting. The bread is an opportunity to practice focusing and exposing one’s camera properly:

I shoot food in color even with this camera. Another advantage of RAW photography.

One thing about this nine year old camera is that when the lighting is good and your exposure is right, it creates a certain look that is so… natural. In the above photo, I hardly did any post-processing—just some straightening and a little to fix the flatness inherent in digital images. (The mouseover shows the default RAW processing in Apple Aperture so you can see the colors as the sensor recorded it.)

It’s hard to get that look with other cameras or in post-processing because I would have chose a different focal length, composition, or the in-camera settings would have inspired me to go a different direction.

Of course, I did pull out my iPhone to photograph also, because it geotags the event correctly, and because it’s much easier when you start getting lazy after the food comes. With a modern phone camera, you have GPS recording, autoexposure, a wide depth-of-field, and a close-focusing autofocusing lens in a tiny pocketable package that you are going to be carrying anyway. That’s hard to beat.

But because you have all that, the photo of the same subject can end up being very different!

Slightly more processing on this one than the “bread shot” as the foreground was rather darker than I reckoned and needed to be recovered.

The iPhone’s wide angle lens and close focusing allowed me to show off the dish better, but I prefer the photo from the Leica more — the limitation of the camera meant I had to step further back to shoot with a normal field-of-view allowing the dish to live more in its environment.

Finally, here are two more photographs. The first is Marie’s main dish taken with my iPhone:

By the way, I quite liked my fried chicken, it perfectly matched my modest appetite and utensil-eating proclivities. I believe Marie was happy with her dishes also.

]]>http://terrychay.com/article/terrys-backstreet-photography.shtml/feed0Holiday on the beachhttp://terrychay.com/article/holiday-on-the-beach.shtml
http://terrychay.com/article/holiday-on-the-beach.shtml#commentsSat, 07 Mar 2015 02:55:42 +0000http://terrychay.com/?p=6102Continue reading Holiday on the beach]]>Photos from February 15, 2015.

I turn the ever-boring “Stretch-X” workouts in P90X on the rest days into excuses to go running. On some days, the time and place fall in line with a holiday, in this case President’s Day weekend on a beautiful late-afternoon in San Francisco.

Holiday on the Beach
China Beach, San Francisco, California

iPhone 6
@ ƒ2.2, ISO32, 4.15mm (29mm)

How lucky I am to live in such a place that I see this on my weekly run!

What’s so amazing is that I don’t have to carry a camera with me because camera phones have gotten much better. Just five years ago, the only time I could get a photo like this was if I bothered to go cycling instead and bring my pocket camera. Now I can do it all, and do it in camera.

What’s crazy was there was no post-processing needed. Though I must confess I used the app Pro HDR to take the photo because I was not pleased with the saturation and sharpness in HDR mode on the built-in camera.

IMG_2013
China Beach, San Francisco, California

iPhone 6
1/879sec @ ƒ2.2, ISO32, 4.15mm (29mm equiv)

(I wish I had upgraded to Pro HDR X beforehand. Then I would not have ghosting in the foreground. :-()

One of the advantages of having a relative who is an artist is that, when they do manage to convince you to get out of your cave, it’s for some cool art exhibition in your neighborhood. In this case, we met up with Chris to see The Matter Within, which was an Indian contemporary art exhibit exhibit at the YBCA.

One of the first and most striking exhibit was Now in Your Neighborhood which used painted plastic bottles to make a dinosaur. My cousin’s son, Juno, sure enjoyed it. I enjoyed taking this photo where, in this brief moment, he mimics the pink sculpture.

Processing notes

Incorrect auto white balance often occurs in mixed indoor/outdoor lighting scenarios. In post-processing, I balanced on the gray of the floor tiles with the eyedropper until I got the right level of warmth.

I then added the film contrast curve I prefer for my color photography. Film contrast often loses detail in the highlights and shadows, so I did some recovery of the shadows (in this case), until I could see the hair detail on my cousin.

Aperture notes

The processing actually involved a lot of cursing. I re-discovered my frustrations with Aperture and Flickr — reminding my why I should have never stopped using FlickrExport. Yet again, Aperture lost the link between the photo on Flickr and Aperture meaning that all my previous changes were desynced from the original image.

When trying to upload a new image, it reduced the resolution to a max of 1024. No amount of fiddling fixed this because there must be some hard-coding that when you add something back into an old album, Aperture will reduce the resolution.

When I deleted it in the Flickr album in Aperture, it deleted the photo entirely in Aperture in a manner that is unrecoverable. Aperture trash reports 12 items, but there is nothing there. Since rebuilding an Aperture database can take days, I just re-imported the photo from my backups and re-processed.

On the other hand, I did a better job than two years ago when forced into a do-over. There’s more detail and better contrast and color balance. It also took me much less time.

]]>http://terrychay.com/article/howl.shtml/feed1The Innovator’s Dilemma and the impossibility of remaking an organizationhttp://terrychay.com/article/the-innovators-dilemma-and-the-impossibility-of-remaking-an-organization.shtml
http://terrychay.com/article/the-innovators-dilemma-and-the-impossibility-of-remaking-an-organization.shtml#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 12:00:44 +0000http://terrychay.com/?p=5935Continue reading The Innovator’s Dilemma and the impossibility of remaking an organization]]>One year ago today (2014-03-03):

During Tech budget and resourcing meeting for the 2014-2015 Annual Plan, one of the ideas proposed was possibly sourcing an incubator group to (re)“build Wikipedia or other major project in line with the Vision from the ground up, without prior constraints from existing technology, processes”, or communities. The idea was, even if it didn’t succeeded it would cause the organization “to think differently, to create energy around being BOLD,” and catalyze the movement.

This had some currency from many of the participants1, even the C-level2 involved, that was until a director argued that this was infeasible due to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Ignoring the obvious misreading of the book, he argued that because this might destroy the existing order inside the organization, it couldn’t be done by the organization itself, and thus the proposal died despite never going up for consensus consideration.3

Deciding that it is politically stupid to point out their Readers’ Digest understanding of a deeply-flawed business text, I instead argued that an organization built around vision, rather than profits, does not have the same constraints that allow disruptive technologies to spell their undoing.

That argument didn’t carry weight because people with more experience than me were sure that this initiative would be defunded in the next annual plan and that no one would ever get behind a project that is a direct threat to them. Incubation outside the WMF is only possibility.

…

It’s sad that people don’t bother to know the most basic lived history of their own industries (or have a terribly short memory).

The Mozilla Firefox project was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser.

The Phoenix name was kept until April 14, 2003, when it was changed because of a trademark dispute with the BIOS manufacturer, Phoenix Technologies (which produces a BIOS-based browser called Phoenix FirstWare Connect). The new name, Firebird, met with mixed reactions, particularly as theFirebird database server already carried the name.

The project which became Firefox started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite called m/b (or mozilla/browser). After it had been sufficiently developed, binaries for public testing appeared in September 2002 under the name Phoenix

Hyatt, Ross, Hewitt and Chanial developed their browser to combat the software bloat of the Mozilla Suite (codenamed, internally referred to, and continued by the community as SeaMonkey), which integrated features such as IRC, mail and news, and WYSIWYG HTML editing into one software suite.

Dave Hyatt would leave Netscape4 for Apple in 2002 and go on to architect the number one competitor to Firefox, Safari and WebKit (the core of Safari and Google Chrome). Blake Ross would work at Netscape/Mozilla until 2004 and be nominated the next year for Wired magazine’s top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year as all of Mozilla’s resources had were redirected to Firefox, a project started internally by two employees to combat the poor direction of original Mozilla project.

…

So yeah, Fuck you.

…

One Year later

It really is astounding when you think about the level of incompetence that was on display.

There are only two large-scale consumer-facing Internet non-profits: The Wikimedia Foundation and Mozilla Foundation (which owns Mozilla Corporation). Someone makes a statement that everyone accepts and affects the entire annual budget. Meanwhile, the only other company that shares organizational affinity with yours is a living counterfactual to the statement.

I didn’t say anything as I was sitting on my resignation letter and didn’t want to humiliate my colleagues, but the disappointment I had back then was immense. Now that I’m gone, that disappointment has turned into relief.

In the months since this time whenever I mentioned this to a WMF staff member, often you’d pretty much have to hold him or her back from wanting to switch into this team if it were to exist. ↩

Not that it would have won that given that this would have required a resource sacrifice among all the Directors… Still, it would have been worth it just to see who cared more about the mission and who more about their fiefdom (or their job). :-) ↩

Mozilla Foundation before it was separated in from Netscape in July 2003. ↩

]]>http://terrychay.com/article/the-innovators-dilemma-and-the-impossibility-of-remaking-an-organization.shtml/feed11SSA Swaghttp://terrychay.com/article/ssa-swag.shtml
http://terrychay.com/article/ssa-swag.shtml#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 08:04:07 +0000http://terrychay.com/?p=6055Continue reading SSA Swag]]>A classmate from my high school must have found my Facebook and put me back on my high school alumni list because a month ago I got an e-mail that the president of my high school was doing a swing down the West Coast. Since one of the meetups was only two blocks from where my girlfriend works, I decided to drag my unemployed ass to see what’s what.

It was a small gathering and, as my generation is a bunch of slackers, I had zero overlap with any of the people there, which is fine. But it was a nice reminder of how privileged an education I had — since my graduation, they’ve gone fully co-educational, built a hockey rink and an art center, now charge more in tuition that my college did, and they’re experimenting with full-time boarding — the last showing that the country day movement ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

They’re also starting up fundraising to build a science center and currently perform among the top in the nation in the science olympiad. What a weird journey it’s been from when I had to take a physics olympics test with only 1/3 of the curriculum so that the department could win a He-Ne laser and the computer science prize only had three eligible people the year I won it (and a single one the next).

I’m told, SWAG stands for “Something We All Get.” and on the way out, they gave me some swag:

SSA Swag
San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-RX1
1/80 sec @ f/2, iso 1250, 35mm

Since I burn through keychains, I’ll be changing to this one. I own a lot of fitted baseball caps, so the cap will probably just come out for golfing—if I ever use it. I am not sure what to do with the magnet.

Looking at the stuff for sale reminded me of three stories from my past…

The first was the only sweatpants they had back then were heather gray Champion sweats that said “Property of SSA Athletic Department.” This was not a small personal trauma in middle school (and most of high school) as the smallest size available was a Mens Small which I’d estimate was about 4-5 inches too long on both inseam and the waist for my tiny frame. I dreaded cold fall and spring days in Pittsburgh, of which there were many, and I took drama instead of sports during the winter season just to avoid the bulk of it. I still have a pair of them that I wear from time to time even though I’ve worn a hole in one of the pant legs and it fits a little small due to over two decades of cotton shrinkage.

The second was that the official athletic shirt back then was actually two cotton t-shirts sewn together. The outer one was blue and the inner one yellow so that you could distinguish teams in scrimmages. However, not everyone remembered to wear the shirt so we’d often go “shirts and skins.” I was skin-and-bones back then and it was a minor trauma every time I got picked to be the yellow side, which was often because scrimmaging is all you do in junior varsity.

(It didn’t matter because for those three years of Middle School, D— suggested we add five when counting each other’s sit-ups during the test. That’s the one thing you definitely learn going to an elite preparatory academy: how to cheat and get away with it.)

]]>http://terrychay.com/article/ssa-swag.shtml/feed0Don’t die without a few scarshttp://terrychay.com/article/dont-die-without-a-few-scars.shtml
http://terrychay.com/article/dont-die-without-a-few-scars.shtml#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 05:32:05 +0000http://terrychay.com/?p=6053Continue reading Don’t die without a few scars]]>I’ve used my break time to start repairing the decades of neglect I’ve heaped on my body by being the stereotypical 90 lb weakling. Being an introvert, that means runs and DVD workouts. And, after many false starts and almost-but-not-enough’s, I finally completed a full cycle of P90X3.

My reward for that was going to be buying and going through P90X2, but after my weight dropped to a level not seen since college — on a scrawny person like me, that’s not exactly a good thing1 — I decided I should probably stick to a simpler workout that might build a little muscle on my skin and bones. So instead, I decided to reward myself with new workout clothing and shoes:

Don’t die without a few scars
San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-RX1
1/80 sec @ f/4, iso 1600, 35mm

I took this photo right before Kenpo X, a workout notorious for being too easy.

Ironware Fitness knuckle irons and shoe irons (I didn’t dared to use these for the P90X3 MMX workout). BTW, the “club” models have an extra layer that will break down over time, so I don’t think it’s worth the extra money.

BTW, the mat is Rubber Flooring Tatami tiles. I have nightmares from being on the first floor so many years, and I don’t want to inflict them on our neighbors.

Verdict:

The new shoes did very well for an indoor workout. I actually prefer zero drop as long as I’m not doing too much running. There is some irony in strapping 1.5 lb weight onto a sub 8oz shoe, though. One oddity is after a single workout, the shoe insole text now reads “The process is the go l.” Not sure what a “go l” is, but next week, it’ll say “The pro is go” so it’ll be fine. I wish New Balance used the gen 1 ink. I can still barely read “lss is mor” three years later. It’s a way better tagline also. I’m not sure these are worth extra money over a pair of Chuck Taylors or Feiyue’s but I couldn’t resist the camo look.

The new shirt did fine also. It’s a little form-fitted, but the side vents did well and I didn’t sweat too much into it, which is unusual. I’ll still stick to my Icebreakers for my runs because they’re looser, have more venting in the rear, and have a nice key pocket and Scotchlite accents.